Steve talks about water usage.
He does not talk about getting twice as efficient with water to get all of the agriculture and industrial and home uses we need.
He talks about killing or restricting the population in half.
Doomers do not go to water saving solutions they go to killing people.

Like the Far Side book of horse medicine where the answer is always shoot the horse. For doomers the answer is always to kill people

Yet even shooting people would not work. There is the examples of world war one and world war two where tens of millions were shot and killed and yet world population still went up.

The doomer preferred solution of getting rid of people does not work for the purpose that they want. Even their doomsday fantasy of struggling humans killing each other and keeping population low does not work.

It takes around 3,000 liters of water to produce a burger. In 2012 around five billion burgers were consumed in the UK alone. That's 15 trillion liters of water – on burgers. Just in the UK. Something like 14 billion burgers were consumed in the United States in 2012. That's around 42 trillion liters of water.

July 12, 2013

ATLAS is one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever built, but is essentially a physical shell for the software brains and nerves that the teams will continue to develop and refine. That software, and the actions of a human operator through a control unit, will guide the suite of sensors, actuators, joints and limbs that make up the robot. The six-foot-two, 330-pound ATLAS is capable of a range of natural movements and is equipped with:

On-board real-time control computer;
Hydraulic pump and thermal management;
Two arms, two legs, a torso and a head;
28 hydraulically actuated joints;
Carnegie Robotics sensor head with LIDAR and stereo sensors; and
Two sets of hands, one provided by iRobot and one by Sandia National Labs.

Oxford Computer Science Professor Steven Emmott published a book Ten Billion and an article about it in The Guardian.

First are Steven's claims of doom. It end where he basically suggests we give our kids guns to prepare for the chaos of collapse. I then rebutt the doomer garbage in and only garbage out model.

Steven Emmott says we are Doomed from not enough food, not enough water, temperature rise

We currently have no known means of being able to feed 10 billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system. Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next 40 years, we will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of the past 10,000 years combined. [NBF - a silly metric of 10,000 years - there was almost no agriculture and a tiny population for 9000 years. It would be good to increase food by 60% so 25% more people can eat 25% more. We can do it.] Yet food productivity is set to decline, possibly very sharply, over the coming decades due to: climate change; soil degradation and desertification

We are going to have to triple – at least – energy production by the end of this century to meet expected demand. To meet that demand, we will need to build, roughly speaking, something like: 1,800 of the world's largest dams, or 23,000 nuclear power stations, 14m wind turbines, 36bn solar panels, or just keep going with predominantly oil, coal and gas – and build the 36,000 new power stations that means we will need.

It is now very likely that we are looking at a future global average rise of 4C – and we can't rule out a rise of 6C. This will be absolutely catastrophic. It will lead to runaway climate change, capable of tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth will become a hellhole

July 11, 2013

China will probably have 1 million people with spinal cord injury in 2020 (80,000 per year). One third of the spinal cord injury people in the world. The US has about 10,000 spinal cord injury patients per year.

Wise Young, MD, PhD Professor and Chair, Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience, Rutgers University Director, W.M. Keck Center for Collaborative Neuroscience Presents a talk at the March 2008 Spinal Cord Workshop: "Spinal Cord Injury: What are the barriers to cure?"

Yes this article has two long videos, but they are very interesting. Telling about procedures that are restoring mobility to full spinal cord injuries and to get past the myths about the state of medicine in China.

Chinese surgeons typically have ten times the experience of american surgeons.
Chinese orthopedic surgeons can handle bone surgery and inject stem cells.
Spinal cord procedures with stem cells need to have bone surgeons with stem cell and nerve surgery all in one or at least a very tight working teams.
The US has a strict split between bone versus neural surgeons.
China has a lot of very well funded hospitals with the latest equipment (bought with the trade surplus.)
China has shifted from government funded medicine to cash only to insurance with 50% copay.
China in 2004 clamped down on clinical trials and has the most strict regulations on it now.
They executed some doctors who did not follow the rules. Now doctors are very careful and precisely follow the rules.

There is a high failure rate and high cost for clinical trials and FDA approvals.
Here is a video that goes through the problem.

80% cannot recruit enough patients for clinical trials.
50% do not have a problem with the drug, but need to redesign the trial (change the dosage or the procedure) and do not have the money to redesign and go through the process again.

We recently covered a new proposal for the first head transplant in humans. They would use a minimally traumatic cut of the spinal cord using an ultra-sharp blade (very different from what occurs in the setting of clinical spinal cord injury, where gross, extensive damage and scarring is observed) followed within minutes by chemofusion (GEMINI). The surgery is performed under conditions of deep hypothermia for maximal protection of the neural tissue. Moreover, and equally important, the motoneuronal pools contained in the cord grey matter remain largely untouched and can be engaged by spinal cord stimulation, a technique that has recently shown itself capable of restoring at least some motor control in spinal injured subjects.

Here we look at video of the monkey head transplant (arteries and veins were connected but not the spinal cord).

Dr. Robert White (Case Western University) removed a monkey head and transplanted it onto another monkey body in 1970. This scene is from the documentary "Stalin's Ape Man".

The researchers established that the new nerve connections accounting for this recovery were occurring over short distances within the spinal cord and not over the longer distances required to connect the brain with the spinal cord.

In a unique collaboration between the University's Veterinary School and MRC's Regenerative Medicine Centre, scientists used a unique type of cell to regenerate the damaged part of the dogs' spines. The researchers are cautiously optimistic that the work could in humans.

We’re confident that the technique might be able to restore at least a small amount of movement in human patients with spinal cord injuries but that’s a long way from saying they might be able to regain all lost function. It’s more likely that this procedure might one day be used as part of a combination of treatments, alongside drug and physical therapies.

China Broad Group will need four months to prefabricate the sections – and three months more to bolt them together on site.

The tower is designed to stand through an earthquake registering nine on the Richter scale.

Saudi Arabia plans a new 1,000 meter £1 billion [US$1.5 billion] super tower in the capital of Jeddah are said to be ‘progressing well”. Saudi Arabia says ground works will start in December 2013 and are set to last 10 months. The tower is scheduled to open in 2018.

China's Broad Group CEO has talked about an over 2000 meter tall 636 story tower that would follow as a Super Sky City.

D-Wave Systems is a Canadian startup in the nascent field of quantum computing.

“Once I came out here and saw what they were doing, I said ‘I’ve got to do this,’” Brownell said in a recent telephone interview. “I had never seen anything that had the potential to disrupt the computing industry the way this had.”

Four years later, Brownell is D-Wave’s chief executive officer, the firm has secured more than C$100 million ($95 million) in investment from backers including Goldman (GS) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN). founder Jeff Bezos and counts Lockheed Martin Co. (LMT), and a lab run by Google Inc (GOOG). and NASA as its customers.

Along with BlackBerry smartphone inventor Mike Lazaridis, who has poured nearly half a billion dollars into quantum science in Waterloo, Ontario, D-Wave is creating a second act for a Canadian technology sector known more recently for Nortel Networks Corp (NRTLQ).’s bankruptcy and BlackBerry’s struggles.

The discovery of the mutation and of the two women with their dazzlingly low LDL levels has set off one of the greatest medical chases ever. It is a fevered race among three pharmaceutical companies, Amgen, Pfizer and Sanofi, to test and win approval for a drug that mimics the effects of the mutation, drives LDL levels to new lows and prevents heart attacks. All three companies have drugs in clinical trials and report that their results, so far, are exciting.

People with stubbornly high cholesterol levels who are taking the drugs in preliminary studies have seen their LDL levels plunging from levels well over 100 to 50, 40, or even lower. Like insulin for diabetes, the drugs are injected, but they are taken once or twice a month.

Dr. Barry Gumbiner, who is directing Pfizer’s studies, said the company had to decide whether to set a floor for patients’ LDL levels. Pfizer is interrupting treatment when LDL levels reach 25 or lower. The people seemed fine, but the company got nervous.

Coined as the ‘Superman’ memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data for over a million years. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

They have experimentally demonstrated the recording and read-out processes of 5D optical data by femtosecond laser writing. The data recording was significantly simplified by replacing the conventional control of the writing beam energy and polarization with a spatial light modulator and a specially designed laser imprinted half-wave plate matrix. This demonstration is a crucial step towards commercialization of ultrafast laser based optical data storage

A Proton-M rocket carrying three satellites for the GLONASS navigation constellation (Russia's GPS system) launched on July 2, 2013. The rocket went sideways and then crashed.

Russian Space Web - By July 9, investigators sifting through the wreckage of the doomed rocket found that the critical angular velocity sensors, DUS, were installed upside down. Each of those sensors had an arrow that was suppose to point toward the top of the vehicle, however multiple sensors on the failed rocket were pointing downward instead. As a result, the flight control system was receiving wrong information about the position of the rocket and tried to "correct" it, causing the vehicle to swing wildly and, ultimately, crash. The paper trail led to a young technician responsible for the wrong assembly of the hardware, but also raised serious issues of quality control at the Proton's manufacturing plant, at the rocket's testing facility and at the assembly building in Baikonur. It appeared that no visual control of the faulty installation had been conducted, while electrical checks had not detected the problem since all circuits had been working correctly.

A similar problem caused a rocket failure from the same manufacturing plant many years ago. Although the sensor has a this way up marking on it. Clearly they needed to design with three screws position so that they would only install the correct way. The kind of design setup that goes into Ikea furniture.

Five big proposals from the Deutsch Bank report on China's air pollutiojn , summarized:
1) Reduce the annual growth in coal from its current rate of 4 percent to 2 percent. Coal use should peak by 2017. (Current projections have coal use peaking in the 2030s.)
2) Adopt scrubbers and other technologies that reduce conventional pollutants from coal-fired power plants 70 percent in the next 18 years. Similar technologies and better fuel efficiency can reduce emissions from vehicles by 80 percent over that time frame.
3) Increase the growth rate for lower-carbon energy technologies, from gas and nuclear to wind and hydro and solar power by 4 percentage points.
4) Slow the number of cars on the road — the 2030 target should be 250 million passenger cars, not the current 400 million.
5) More rails and subways. A lot more, in fact.

There’s a lot more detail in the report, but the analysts estimate that if China does all this, it can reduce maximum annual average levels of PM2.5 down to about 35 micrograms per cubic meter by 2030

Some just announced action to try to reduce air pollution or at strongly slow its growth

The rise of a global middle class with an average of $12,000 GDP per capita and halving of world extreme poverty are some of the biggest changes that effect the most people. I have projected how that seems likely to continue to a per capita income of about $20,000 GDP PPP per capita in ten years and $30,000 GDP PPP per capita in twenty years.

This shift effects world energy usage and resource utilization and public health (richer people and countries can afford cleaner water and more food.)

I also added in how many times higher the US per capita GDP is above the world average GDP PPP per capita.
I also added in how many times higher the world average GDP per capita PPP is above the world extreme poverty line ($1 per day in 1996 and $1.25 per day in 2005 and then inflation adjusted assumption going forward)

World Poverty was halved from 40% to 20% from 1993 to 2010 and could halve again by 2020

Mobileye announced today that it is selling $400 million in equity to “five unaffiliated” financial investors, which include “some of the largest U.S.-based global institutional asset managers and a leading Chinese government-affiliated financial investor,” according to a statement released this morning. The transaction, which values the company at $1.5 billion (pre-money) and was overseen by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is expected to close in August.

The newer version of Mobileye’s system that arrives this summer aims to help steer the car in stop-start situations, though drivers are still required to keep their hands on the wheel. Coming up next, and expected to be street-ready by 2013, is a more advanced system that will allow for hands-free driving.

Geordie Rose is the CTO and Founder of D-Wave Computing, a Canadian company that is currently selling a 512 qubit superconducting quantum annealing system. They plan to have a 2048 qubit system within about two years. The 2048 qubit system could be 500,000 times faster for certain optimization problems. Google and Lockheed have already purchased systems. The quantum annealing systems is focused on optimization problems useful for certain artificial intelligence and machine learning problems.

- automated machine learning
- automatic classification of images

In this talk, he describes the way quantum mechanics will be able to solve massive problems that conventional computers cannot even begin to answer.

It’s clear that what’s essential is proximity to human talent and new ideas. Jean-François Formela, a venture capitalist at Atlas Venture who invests in early-stage biotechnology startups, says he visits Boston-area academic labs several times a week, trying to find the next invention that he can license and turn into a company. And because there are so many PhDs and MDs in the area, he can start a company and build a team remarkably fast. “People don’t even have to change buildings,” he says. “They just switch floors.”

Three years ago, Yoo used super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth to turn a white crystal into a "super battery,” or what he called "the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy.”

This time, Yoo saw how carbon disulfide subjected to high pressure and cold started to act like a metal, taking on properties like magnetism, high-energy density and super-hardness as its molecules reassembled in three-dimensional structures like those found in diamonds.

Typically, nonmetallic molecules are too far apart from each other - three times farther apart than metal molecules - for electrical energy to move across them. But Yoo and his colleagues, including researchers at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, compressed the compound in the small space of a diamond anvil cell to 50,000 atmospheres - a pressure equivalent to that found 600 miles into the Earth. They also chilled the compound to 6.5 degrees Kelvin, or nearly -447 F.

Environmental problems are a source of rising social discontent in China; last month Beijing promised new measures to crack down on air pollution, partly by hastening a shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels

A Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [PNAS] paper’s findings suggest that an arbitrary Chinese policy that greatly increases total suspended particulates (TSPs) air pollution is causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. The quasi-experimental empirical approach is based on China’s Huai River policy, which provided free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in cities north of the Huai River but denied heat to the south. Using a regression discontinuity design based on distance from the Huai River, we find that ambient concentrations of TSPs are about 184 μg/m3 [95% confidence interval (CI): 61, 307] or 55% higher in the north. Further, the results indicate that life expectancies are about 5.5 years (95% CI: 0.8, 10.2) lower in the north owing to an increased incidence of cardiorespiratory mortality. More generally, the analysis suggests that long-term exposure to an additional 100 μg/m3 of TSPs is associated with a reduction in life expectancy at birth of about 3.0 years (95% CI: 0.4, 5.6).

Europe has an impact of about 8 months reduction in life expectancy from European air pollution.

Most of the new nuclear reactors are being built by China, India, Russia and South Korea. They are each developing their own small modular nuclear reactors. They will clearly mainly be buying their own nuclear reactor designs. It is only the middle eastern and other countries that do not have their own designs who will be buying the reactors created by other countries.

Boeing is taking this a step further with a concept for hybrid airplanes the size of 737s, which can seat more than 150 passengers, although it’s unlikely these will come into service before 2030. EADS, the parent company of Airbus, has also developed a conceptual design for passenger airplanes that fly exclusively on electricity, although the range of these aircraft would be limited.

Higher power density batteries, lighter electronics, superconductors that will enable smaller and more powerful engines, lighter and stronger materials will all help enable larger and more efficient hybrid and electric aircraft.

Flying hybrid: This two-seater electric-gas airplane may be the first of many to take to the skies. It has a range of 900 kilometers (600 miles)

The undeclared war that has been quietly raging since the 1990s in Ontario’s electricity sector flared into the open last week, with a new ad from the biggest union. Mincing no words, the Power Workers’ Union put its case starkly: this is nuclear versus natural gas, and Ontario’s electricity future is at stake. According to Steve Aplin of Canadian Energy Issues, this statement could not be more accurate.

Enigma machines are devices that perform cryptography using pseudo-random numbers. The original enigma machine code was broken by detecting hidden patterns in these pseudo-random numbers. This paper proposes a model for a quantum optical enigma machine and shows that the phenomenon of quantum data locking makes such quantum enigma machines provably secure even in the presence of noise and loss. [Arxiv - Quantum enigma machines]

The enigma machine used for cryptography during the second world war was a device which, given a short keyword, produced a pseudorandom output which could be decoded by a second machine using the same keyword. The original enigma machine consisted of a series of rotors through which electrical current could pass in a way that depended on the relative orientation of the rotors. The path taken by the current connected an input symbol to an output system. After each key press the rotors went through a stepping motion that changed the functional relationship between input and output for the next key press. A sender and receiver who prepared their machines using the same initial setting, determined by the keyword, could then exchange encrypted messages. While the enigma machine did a pretty good job of scrambling the input, the outputs deviated suﬃciently from pseudorandom sequences that the enigma code could be broken. In general, classical codes based on pseudo-random numbers are secure only if P <> NP proving the security of such codes is accordingly diﬃcult. This paper proposes a quantum optical version of the enigma machine and shows that it is secure in principle, in the sense that amount of information that Eve can access about the message can be made arbitrarily small, even in the presence of arbitrary amounts of loss.

The security of quantum enigma machines relies on the phenomenon of quantum data locking.

They gave a first sneak peek of Anki Drive at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. At first glance, it’s a racing game that pits real cars against players and each other – but after playing for a few minutes, you’ll see what makes Anki Drive special: They are making the first video games in the real world, and their team has worked tirelessly on the robotics and AI challenges that this presents. Each car is equipped with sensors and intelligent software to make thousands of decisions every second. They use mobile devices not as remote controls, but as drivers for an immersive real-world experience. And they took great care to make sure that despite everything under the hood, the final experience is intuitive and entertaining.

Anki Drive is the first steps of the future of robotics and artificial intelligence being realized. It is a transformative entertainment experience, and it has countless possibilities in the future.